[nostrademons]

The culture is fairly different between the South Bay vs. San Francisco. South Bay is largely full of immigrants living the American dream: they work hard at a FANG during the day, buy an expensive suburban house to go home to at night, take their kids to parks and cultural attractions on the weekends and do their best to make sure they get into a good college, and otherwise mind their own business. Basically like the rest of America but less white. SF has many more people who like to stick their nose in other people's business to enact radical social change. It also has more genuine diversity and weirdness. SF is where people like to do large-scale social experiments, the South Bay largely sticks to large-scale technical experiments.

This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).